April 29, 2015

Robert Putnam's research on diversity and civic participation shows that the more diverse an area is, the less likely the individuals are to coordinate their shared interests at a larger scale. That not only affects relations among individuals from different ethnic groups -- blacks and whites won't cooperate -- but even within the same group -- whites don't cooperate with each other, and blacks don't cooperate with each other.

Could there be an upside to the failure of individuals to coordinate their collective behavior? Yes -- if their purpose were anti-social or decadent. The decay on display in Baltimore provides a great case study.

It's no surprise that the rioting and looting are taking place in neighborhoods that are nearly 100% black. Blacks are more impulsive and inclined toward both violent crime and property crime. What is unusual, however, is that the neighborhoods that are closer to 50-50 black and white are not merely afflicted by rioting to a lesser degree than the 100% black areas, but are hardly affected at all. (See the maps at the end of this post.)

What gives?

Rioting and looting are collective behaviors, however fleeting and decentralized. They do not require sustained interest and permanent institutions to carry out the collective will, but they do rely on a minimal level of in-group cohesion and trust in order to keep the snowball growing rather than flaking into pieces or turning the members against one another.

In fact, with a little more regular participation and a bit more of an "honor among thieves" relationship, coordinated crime by an organized ethnic group could sustain a gang or mafia, again provided the area belongs entirely to that ethnic group.

The mafia operated in neighborhoods that were predominantly Italian, not in those that were half-Italian and half-non-Italian. Black gangs controlled South Central L.A. back when it was all black; Mexican gangs control it now that it's all Mexican. If the neighborhood was only half-Italian or half-black, the mafia and gang problem was not simply half as bad as in the fully Italian or black areas, but could not get going in the first place. (Of course, they would have still been subject to individual-level crime, just not collectively organized crime.)

White enclaves in large cities tend not to be stricken by rioting and looting, because anti-social whites express their deviance in non-violent ways. When they coordinate their deviance at the collective level, they take over the local education system and ban peanuts from school grounds, they carve out bike lanes for non-existent bike riders while clogging the narrowed streets for actually-existing drivers, and they take over any business area that once supported a variety of normal utilitarian shops and turn them all into arenas for decadent status contests (quirky bars, quirky coffee shops, quirky doggie yoga day-spas).

Yet as in the case of black rioting, these collective insanities only infect neighborhoods that are nearly 100% white. If it's only 50-50, the hipsters and yuppies don't feel emboldened enough to organize their decadent impulses. They don't have the sense that their ethnic group totally owns the place and can do whatever they want with it, for better or worse.

Overall, diversity is corrosive to society at any scale. But there is a silver lining: it also prevents anti-social collective behavior from catching fire.

Maps of diversity and rioting in Baltimore

Here is a map of racial diversity around Baltimore. Blue dots are blacks, red dots are whites. (From a series of similar maps here.)

The core of the city is where the dots are the densest, more or less in the center of the image.

There are two stark areas that are mostly black -- West Baltimore and East Baltimore, close to the core. Farther away from the core (for example, toward the northeast), the blue dots overlap red dots, showing a more mixed area than a pure-black ghetto.

There are three main areas that are mostly white -- North Baltimore (the large wedge pointing south that separates the black areas to the west and east), and two smaller but denser enclaves that lie just south (on a tiny peninsula) and just southeast of the core (in a red ring).

Yuppie and hipster decadence is concentrated in the all-white areas, such as Hampden in the North Baltimore wedge, Downtown near the center, and Fell's Point in the red ring lying southeast of the core. To the northeast, there are still plenty of whites, but they live in more diverse neighborhoods. SWPL decadence in a "nice boring" place like Belair is not at half the level of Fell's Point, but barely there at all.

As for black decadence, here is a map of the major riots in 1968, overlaid with the riots in 2015 (which are much smaller -- though wait until 2020). They come from this article at Vocativ.

The scale on this map is more zoomed-in than the map of diversity. The major and minor riots have afflicted the all-black areas of West and East Baltimore, close to the core. There are plenty of blacks living out to the west and southwest, as well as out toward the northeast, but they find themselves in more diverse neighborhoods.

In these diverse neighborhoods, would-be rioters apparently don't feel they can trust their fellow blacks enough to carry out an afternoon and evening of looting, trashing windows, and setting cars on fire. If only they owned the whole neighborhood, "shit would git real". But with nobody trusting anybody else in a mixed area, they're going to just watch the riots on Wurl Stah and vent their aggression on Twitter.

When the neighborhood might otherwise be burning down, here's one cheer for diversity-induced atomization.

though, to be fair, Nazism was also a product of cocooning, which is associated with all kinds of insanity. when everybody is cocooned and not interacting in communities, but capable of reining in their competitiveness and behaving cooperatively, the logical result is individuals becoming attached to the state or government.

I lived this of sorts. My old neighborhood was about 55% Hispanic 35% white, 10% other. While it was associated with some Hispanic gang, their activity was relatively light, and whatever business they did in the neighborhood was discreet. Nobody really spent any time getting to know each other. Even among the whites or Hispanics. Kids might play in the alley occasionally and that was it. People were civil, but guarded.

When we moved we were looking at Oak Park (an affluent suburb just west of Chicago. West Chicago is not particularly safe) and I noticed that the crime magically stopped at the border. That wasn't a particularly strong assurance to me, and I wanted a larger buffer from the higher crime areas in case stuff got really real, so we settled elsewhere. Where we settled was 90% white.

I know my neighbors rather well. We will be talking outside and just sort of have an impromptu BBQ and stuff like that. One guy brought his big screen outside during the World Cup and turned his backyard into a sort of Beer Garden for a few weeks. And yes there are a lot of people that "care" about stupid stuff and show up to committee meetings and complain, and occasionally they get stupid ordinances passed.

Going by the maps, it seems that the common wisdom, that the East coast is in for serious trouble, is wrong. New York and Philadelphia are both pretty desgregated.

On the other hand, southern cities appear to be significantly more segregated. Columbus, Jacksonville, Atlanta will see some serious problems. Interestingly, the most segregated cities are in Texas, which will be a frontline in coming ethnic conflicts.

Like I said, counterintuitive - the south will be in turmoil while the East coast is more peaceful.

Finally, I think the West, barring Los Angeles, will be relatively peaceful, due to its mixed up nature caused by status-striving transplants.

"In contrast, blacks in the more mixed areas of the East Coast and Midwest broke out into full riot-and-loot mode. Unlike the church-organized plans of blacks in the South, an atmosphere of anarchy and mob rule prevailed among the race rioters in the desegregated parts of the country."

I'm not denying that desegregation may cause a kind of rioting, but I'm wondering what the distinction is between that caused by segregation vs. the violence caused by diversity.

The difference is that in the South, blacks are not concentrated into really dense areas, for the most part. The segregation boundary is a straight line, and blacks are allowed to disperse away from that line, and whites too, going in opposite directions.

It's segregation plus density that creates a ghetto, and a breeding ground for rioting. The denser the population, the easier it is for social contagion to catch on.

Birmingham is segregated along a straight line, but doesn't really have a ghetto, nor a history of rioting and looting, because the black side of the line is spread out rather than packed in.

Some places in the South do have ghettos, though -- New Orleans, Orlando, maybe a few others.

This is also why Jews have so ruthlessly striven to push and keep all goyim out of a business they come to dominate.

One thing Hollywood (run by gay Jews, natch) has done is re-write history to make it seem that all of prohibition/organized crime was run by Italians from the 19teens onward, with occasional allowances for Irish gangsters who get killed off by the better-organized Italians.

In truth, the organized mafias of the 20th century in the US--especially in the first half--were evenly split between Jews and Italians. A few times Hollywood has let this slip out: Hyman Roth in the Godfather movies is clearly a Jewish name, and in the film Eight Men Out (about a world series fixed by the patron saint of Jewish-American gangsters, Arnold Rothstein), when the reporters start talking about the criminals fixing the series, they make mention of the "large nosed" gangsters involved, invoking a Jewish stereotype. But, for the most part, Hollywood tries to make it seem like every major crime organization in the 20th century ate marinara sauce and came from Sicily.

The Jewish mob bosses used many Italians as fronts or useful fall guys; Meyer Lansky, who never got caught, used Lucky Lucciano as on; Lucciano got deported, but Lansky never served a day in prison. And the Jews worked ruthlessly to exclude other ethnicities from organized crime, mainly the Irish, who were the older guard criminals at this point; The Atlantic City Meeting, for example, was called so that the Jews and Italians could decide how to eliminate the Irish guys from the trade.

Steve Sailer mentions often how women MBAs were often advised not to work in clothing in Southern California--because the Jews would not even promote them past secretary. The long freezeout of Walmart from "respectable" circles was because Walton wasn't Jewish and did it all without reliance on Jewish finance in New York. And let's not get started on Hollywood studio heads casually dropping yiddish or hebrew terms on up-and-coming executives as shibboleths.

Serendipitously, I was remembering and looking at maps, identifying where the black inner core was, and other lines of demarcation. I had just read an article where the author proffered a theory about why no rioting in North Charleston.

I lived there for 3.5 years around the turn of the millenium. The first 6 months were dead center in that inner core (for those familiar, next to the old Naval Hospital...oh yes, yes we did). The black population and crime have come down some since we lived there, but otherwise recognizable from other things I read.

I don't know why Baltimore and not Charleston. That inner core is exceedingly violent with young men having dead eyes (I think that one guy who got killed may have been outside it, but would have to look). A few months before we moved there, a teen-aged boy got beaten to death walking on the sidewalk for being white (we didn't know).

Directly behind us were some projects that were enclosed and topped with razor wire. I've been lost in my share of projects: Tampa, Cleveland, Nashville, but have only seen this there. Don't know about today.Only desperate blacks shopped at the grocery store a block away. I noticed that the store was always eerily empty, yet there was someone getting arrested every single time I went. Three times before I realized I needed to go elsewhere. You don't have to head north on Rivers long at all before you get to the working poor, working class black areas where you can start to breathe.

The Charleston metro area's percentage of Blacks is lower (30.8% of just under 700,000). Could be the difference.

Another: maybe the whites are more monolithic in Charleston. This idea came to me when I read about the City "journalists" who got caught lying about the actions of white bar patrons, a redheaded woman in particular, vis a vis the rioters. They are Brandon Soderberg and Caitlin Goldblatt.

Not that it is particularly important, but Walter Scott was killed very far away from that inner core. He's well within the mixed white/black working class area, in fact, close to the Air force base. From the troubles I had read about him, working poor problems, but not violent, he and his brother didn't sound like they were from the inner core. Sad.

I didn't know Goose Creek well at all, but I think I went there a couple of times and my memory is that it was very rundown. Summerville was very nice, though.

North Charleston is huge, and was huge when we were there. Except for that urban core, it is very white and not just working class, either.Now, in a shocker, I learned today that hipsters are gentrifying some of the working class parts of it (No, not that area around the Naval Hospital...nigger please!) Even in the Charleston Peninsula, whites have taken back some of it. When we lived there, there was this large, blocks' long buffer between the southern, middle peninsula before you hit the black core starting in the northern part and heading into North Charleston. There were all these beautiful old Victorians that had fallen massively into disrepair and you'd see black people sitting out on the porches. And flashing cop car lights somewhere. Always.

Never knew y'all had lived in SC. I grew up in Myrtle Beach and lived there 13 years. I never thought of it as particularly unsafe. Now I hear black classmates on facebook saying how things are getting more violent...not sure how much stock to put into that. The country blacks that are there always seemed calmer and easier to get along with. But just being around them opened my eyes to a lot of things.